Elevance Health Inc. (NYSE:ELV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Gail Boudreaux: Yeah. Thank you, Pete. As you can hear from the excitement I think from Pete and all the things we’re doing about Carelon Services and CarelonRx, there’s a lot going on to really build our strategy and I think execute on it. And I guess I would just punctuate two things that Pete talked about. One, the behavioral health area. We really see ourselves as a leader in the crisis management area as well as we’re seeing a lot of internal or external validated — validity of that strategy. And I think starting to pull through not just in its historic government business, but also on the commercial side where they’re integrating physical and behavioral in particular, which is a core part of our whole health strategy. And then on the pharmacy side, again, we’re really trying to make sure that the value and strategic levers are coming through and you heard that in what Pete talked about. So thanks for the question, Lance, and next question please.

Operator: Next, we’ll go to the line of Justin Lake from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Justin Lake: Thanks. Good morning. First, just wanted to follow-up on AJ’s question to see if you can give us a little color. You’re saying trend is above normal and you priced for it. We appreciate that color. Just any kind of incremental that you can give us on how much higher and what you’ve seen in 1Q to 2Q might be helpful? And then my question is just take that to the margin side, right, can you tell us how margins are running versus the expectations coming into the year? I know you had expected improvement in Medicare and commercial and obviously some volatility in Medicaid. Can you tell us how those are running in specifically, anything on Medicare beyond Puerto Rico issues you discussed in the second quarter would be helpful? Thanks. Or how that’s trending?

John Gallina: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Justin. And I’m happy to provide the follow-up. As I said, I’ll start out by reiterating, we did raise our EPS guidance and proactively reaffirmed MLR guidance for the year. So I think that actually has a hoard view of trend inherent in it. Yeah. But having said that, I’m not so sure that we’re really seeing anything that much differently than some other folks have been saying. We’ve been expecting the cost of healthcare to be elevated compared to the baseline as if COVID never existed. I’m not going to provide a specific point estimate, but only to say that we’ve seen it, we’ve priced for it and we’ve included and factored it into our expectations. And this is the second time this year we’ve raised guidance and reaffirming the MLR outlook.

So I think we’re in pretty good position. Associated with the margins, commercial is doing very well. I’ll start out with Health Benefits in total. That’s our Health Benefits segment. Margins improved 50 basis points year-over-year and are on track to hit the guidance of greater than — improvement of 30 basis points to 60 basis points. I do want to note in my prepared comments, I had a comment about a court ruling that we disagree with that we took a charge. Without that charge, the margin improvement would have been higher than the high end of the 30 basis point to 60 basis point improvement year-over-year. So Health Benefits margins are going quite well. Commercial repricing effort, Medicaid is very much in line with expectations and Medicare Advantage is actually relatively in line with expectations aside from the one geography that have been pointed out that really is not all that material or significant to the overall results of Elevance Health.

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